Spotify is a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs.

This Internet music service allows you to select any song in it's database and stream for free. The service was recently introduced to the United States after previously being exclusive to Europe. The only client currently available on Linux is supported on Debian and Fedora distributions, while they do recommend use under Wine. The only catch to using this application as a free user is the inability to go mobile without a premium subscription. Their are also the occasional voice ads in between songs for users who do not wish to subscribe.

Spotify also offers free users the ability to create playlist which can be shuffled, and set to repeat tracks. Content provided by Spotify comes in explicit versions as well as censored.

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Installation

If you are interested in using Spotify under Archlinux, you must ensure that you have Wine installed on your system. In addition to installing Wine you will need to take a moment to configure it for the user who will be running the application.

Depending on your choice of architecture it may be necessary for you to enable the multilib repositories. This is necessary to install Wine on x86_64 systems, if not enabled pacman will inform you that the package was not found.

# pacman -Syy
# pacman -S wine wine_gecko

Configure wine

When wine is installed you will need to change some configuration settings using the winecfg application on your every day user account (not root).

$ winecfg

After launching the winecfg application you will be presented with multiple tabs that can assist you in tweaking the performance of the emulator. However for this purpose your main focus will be the Audio tab.

While under the audio tab, you will enable either the ALSA or OSS driver by clicking the check box next to them, depending on what software you prefer to use. Also note that the hardware acceleration will need to be changed from Full to Emulation. When done you may exit the winecfg application.

Failure to perform the above task will result in the inability to hear playback.

Get Spotify

Obtaining Spotify can be done by registering for an account on their Website, the application does not offer in-app registration.

However you can obtain the application prior to registering by using the following URL. [1]

After you have registered and downloaded your copy of the installer you will need to run the application through Wine, depending on your setup you may be able to run the application by right clicking the file. If not terminal will work just fine, as long as you run the below command in the directory of your download.

$ wine Spotify\ Installer.exe

Once the application is successfully installed you may run Spotify by using one of the following commands in terminal, or in the ALT+F2 launcher:

If you use a x86_64 copy of ArchLinux, you'll have to run it like this: